


‘Ere Jack Comes Home Again

by eirabach



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Gen, I bring angst, I can’t even apologise, I have an alarming amount of feelings about grandma, Thunderbirds are Go! - Freeform, and what I live for, anyway hi I’m new here hello, anyway this is about Sally Tracy and her nerves of steel, emo naval gazing trash, is what i am, it’s all the sofa cuddling, it’s given me emotions, it’s my nature, maybe lead, obviously, sos part 2, which might in fact be nerves of something a bit softer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 21:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19411639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach
Summary: If a Tracy stopped to dwell everytime their life flashed in front of their eyes they’d never get anything done.Sally Tracy is a busy woman.





	‘Ere Jack Comes Home Again

They say that when you stand on the precipice between life and death the neurons in your failing brain form a sort of panicked soup from which you dredge up every memory, every feeling, until your whole life plays out before you like some ancient reel to reel movie with static where all the boring parts should be.

‘They’, in this case, being Alan, whose flights of wild imagination have led him on more than one occasion to give himself nightmares from his own invented campfire stories. Sally, for her part, had always been certain it was bullshit.

As far as she’s concerned if a Tracys life flashed before their eyes everytime they faced danger they’d never get through her fried breakfast, never mind find time to save the world.

But Alan takes after Grant after all, and Grant was never one to curtail his imagination. Whether it was the beauty of a new continent, a hideously green tractor, or a particularly well managed wheat field he’d gloried in all the possibilities before him. But then the war, and imagination had become dangerous, had taken her bright eyed husband and dimmed his light for good as he watched his son dragged into the maelstrom.

_ Their _ son.

Sally couldn’t afford to be imaginative. Can’t. The world has long since proven that it will strip its pound of flesh from her whether she worries or not. She has to be practical. Reliable.  _ Here _ , when Grant and Jeff and their incredible imaginations are long gone.

She’s no use to her boys if she’s a million miles away after all, caught up in the gunfire and romance of her memory.

So she’d never smelt her mother’s perfume over the stink of burning jet fuel, or heard Jeff laugh at the edge of a tornado. Never.

But now - 

Now, she’s in Florida. 

It’s summer, hot and humid. Her palms are sweaty and somewhere ten thousand miles above her she knows her son is careening through space in a tin can of his own invention.

Now, they’re at the beach.

Lucy is ethereal in her memory. A ghost, with nothing but a sweep of red hair and a sweet murmur where her voice once lingered. She rests an avalanche pale hand against a bump that Sally knows didn’t exist, but memories are funny things. Scott’s eyes weren’t that old, either. John’s legs weren’t that long. Virgil never skipped down those dunes in an exosuit.

She’s not senile, though. Not yet anyway. The memory of the hand in hers is real and solid. She can feel the chubby fingers, sticky with a big brother’s pilfered ice cream, and hear the delighted cry of this - a toddler’s first introduction to the ocean.

Lucy’s wraith whispers something, but Sally lets it float away on the breeze, forgotten. She’s captivated instead by the determination of little feet as he’d dragged her after him. Deeper. Deeper. Ankles. Knees. Belly. She concentrates on the memory of salt-damp golden curls and the way he’d squealed with glee as he’d tugged his hand from hers and slipped, the way her damp hands had scrabbled for purchase -

“Gordon!”

Her cry echoes from that beach a million years ago. Bounces off spaceships and satellites, warping and twisting until it’s John. John, calling through the comm unit on her little boy’s desk.

Her  _ dead _ boy’s desk.

Her  _ boy _ .

She closes her eyes, wills herself back to that beach a lifetime ago, revels in the surprised splutter, the shriek as she lifted him up, up and out and onto dry land and -

_”Again! Again, G’ma!”_

She dares to imagine.

* * *

_ Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main _

_ Many a stormy wind will blow _

_ ‘Ere Jack comes home again. _

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Hello there. I’m new to the fandom and so this is my first foray into fic here although I’ve written extensively for other fandoms (mainly ouat). Still finding my groove with the characters but ready to flail hysterically over TAG on tumblr where I go by mahstatins.


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